We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends. Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.
The Wayland ecosystem just runs on top of standard kernel interfaces and that's a really huge win for any future protocols.
I wouldn't wish to defend them, but by all accounts the biggest reason is because Xorg's code quality is quite poor, which is (if true) somewhat fair. I wish they tried replacing it without breaking everything and shipping the terrible design that is Wayland, but the goal of replacing Xorg is reasonable.
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
The reality is much simpler. The parent corporations, mostly Red Hat really back in the days, wanted to have more control. And, in some ways, wayland is indeed simpler as a protocol.
Also, you write "replacing Xorg is reasonable". First, I don't think it is, but even more importantly than that, wayland is NOT a replacement. It is another display server and protocol. They do not have as goal to be compatible to Xorg at all, so "replacing" is the wrong term here. They indeed broke a ton of things, or rather, required of downstream applications to be rewritten - but the statement that they aim to replace Xorg is not the case. They are simply another display server + protocol at the end of the day. And they won't be a full "replacement" feature-wise either, that's why using wayland always feels like a dumbed down variant of xorg-server. Admittedly wayland also has a few new features such as the easy restart, but this may come to the new xserver too eventually. One has to wait and see. (The easy restart variant is something I like in wayland; hopefully xserver will have that too eventually. It would be technically possible. Also, xserver already is different to xorg-server, in many ways better too. Neither wayland nor xserver aim for 100% compatibility with the old, venerable xorg-server anymore.)
Every single thing under the Sun going into systemd is going to cause issues (and probably already has with age verification laws and such) with compliance where a company is a singular target (Red Hat under IBM) to compel to make undesired changes contrary to our interests as users.
Red Hat is probably an even bigger problem than GNOME.
On the topic of WMs, some of these classics are really great. Openbox is a favorite of mine among the floating, but bspwm has been my overall favorite for 11 years.
How is this comparison supposed to make any sense? When Xorg started it was a fork of the existing XFree86 codebase (due to XFree86 changing license to one not deemed open source compatible), not starting from a clean sheet of paper. And XFree86 in turn wasn't a clean sheet implementation of the X protocols either, it IIRC started as a bunch of patches on top of the reference X11 codebase which goes back to the 1980'ies.
(I'm 100% not a fan of using a single process for all terminals).
And I don't mean the code, I mean the design / architecture / UX expertise.
> Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those
Those being the GUI toolkits like Qt and KDE one.
But yes, I agree, I have done UIs in low level (Skia) and high level (web, android) and I know it is a lottttt of work.
As for X11, its network transparency is something I used a lot in the past and relied on. I miss it.
Wayland was developed by people who got sick of X11. No one who actually dealt with X11 is missing it, most people who complain about wayland and yarn for X11 just miss features that took a while to get right.
Can you explain why Gnome specifically? Genuine question. I know Gnome is very opinionated, many people don't like it, and these days there are super polished projects like Niri. But in what way is Gnome holding us back?
I can't count the number of times I've watched people experience Linux for the first time via Gnome, and become convinced that Linux is weird and unworkable. Thankfully, those days have mostly passed, and vastly more friendly, conventional and appealing desktops are now often the first experience someone is likely to have.
I'm not a Gnome hater. I've deliberately chosen to use it at times. But I've been at all of this a while, and I understand what I'm dealing with, so the Gnome papercuts and "opinionated" behavior are things I can cope with. "Coping," being exactly what I feel like I'm doing when using Gnome.
Anyhow, more on theme with regard to lightweight DE's, my current go-to is openbox, which I use on auxiliary displays for game development. It starts faster than I can lift my finger from the enter key and neatly manages windows. That's about all I want from it and it pleases me.
Grumpy luddites gonna be grumpy luddites but I am pretty sure that Gnome is more approcheable than windows and macOs for the newer generations who are more accustomed to mobile interfaces since they are kids.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49833842
But to explain further, Gnome is run by people who have the attention span of a dead goldfish. They're constantly changing things, a good example is the control centre where it used to be just like other systems but in Gnome 3 they made it into a wall of incoherent text and disorganised categories.
They often tend to ditch things halfway and create new ones, Evince -> Papers, Totem -> showtime, EOG to Loupe, Cheese to snapshot, and so on and so on.
And for decades, they kept removing much used features and configurations and broke things and everytime you search for a fix, there was 10 version and a new one each week because Gnome keeps changing things.
In short, Gnome is what happens when you think you're Apple but have the design knowhow and depth of a paddle you couldn't drown a fruit fly in.
This wasn’t a hostile takeover attempt; we all tried very hard to be team players, many times to what I think was our detriment. A very nice version of Nautilus was rejected because it was in C++ and we ended up doing all the work in GTK.
We had some very good ideas about distributed objects but they were pushed aside and we ended up using CORBA/ORBit/Bonobo and those distributed object systems ended up being replaced.
The dotcom crash caused a lot of Eazel people to end up at Apple. Nat and Miguel moved onto their dot NET Xamarin effort and many others ended up at Red Hat. There was an experience vacuum and this is one reason why the GNOME UX had so many issues IMHO.
There's a very good alternative in development - check out V OS - https://v-os.dev/ - it is attempting to port the Be / Haiku GUI and SDK on to Linux, and even though it's still an alpha-beta release, the experience is really good. Unlike GTK's "clunkiness", Be/Haiku GUI feels so buttery smooth, and consumes so little computing resource (compared to GTK or Qt). As they aren't re-inventing anything new, I have high hopes for it. It just needs more support from all of us to thrive.
Switched for Unity for a few years when I was erring on Ubuntu side, where I like the minimalism style.
Gnome 3 was a shock but nothing any normal human being can easily overcome. The hardest was to live without a taskbar, but I'm free now.
Would never touch KDE-let-s-make-this-pixel-also-clickable, but that's the power of freedom: you can choose what you like.
Nothing is forcing you, but you may be surprised.
Do you use NetworkManager or systemd-networkd or something else? What is your login manager? Do you use Gnome for email or anything else?
I am asking this in earnest because I don't believe Gnome has left anything useful beyond GTK as the library (if you consider that useful) and maybe nautilus. Everything else is just bolted on and weird and broken.
See: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
Also I don't understand why you write that pipewire broke with the past. That's also totally incorrect.
Wayland I agree with your statement but that's a corporate-controlled project by the GNOMEy overlords, so this is not a surprise (GTK5 will support wayland only; that was one reason why I stopped writing more GTK code).
As for your systemd comment: again I have no idea what you write. It does not make any sense. And the word "cohesive" is odd: all the systemd components, of course, form a cohesive unit WITHIN ITSELF from the get go - that was the whole point for the systemd developers to make themselves more important. systemd was never a "replace init only" attempt, they deliberately took over the ecosystem here to leverage more control. And that also, kind of, makes sense for those controlling many computers in a, say, university campus or so; administrators find that some jobs were made easier by that. For me, and many others, systemd brought nothing to the table that was needed. They always built strawmen such as "you may abandon your legacy shell scripts booting your system" - I don't use shell scripts in general. All logic I have is done via ruby + yaml files mostly (or, data files that describe the logic in a DSL like manner), so I never had any use case for systemd. As for your claim that you do not have to tinker with systemd: again, I have no idea why you write this. It sounds like a very poor and one-sided attempt to promote systemd. You never had an issue? I had numerous issues whenever I would use systemd, starting from smaller to larger issues. For instance, I remember that my local clock was not well-aligned so I changed it. Then I tested again and noticed the clock did not change. It took me a while to figure out that systemd inserted itself here and ignored my attempt to fix the local clock. Past that point I treated systemd as an invasive virus that attempts to ignore my commands, so off it went. That's just one example of many more issues with systemd. The philosophy the systemd devs use is mega-aggressive and incompatible with many other things, including the old UNIX pipe idea as well as "everything is a file".
> We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends.
I would not use the term cancer, but I would agree that we could need more flexibility. We simply lack viable options here. Corporations de-facto control most of the code here. Or AI. Not a good future really.
> Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.
Again, no clue what you write here, but let's also be realistic: which alternatives to GTK or QT do you see coming up here? Plus, we then have more code for a toolkit. What we need is a meta-toolkit, that can be used in its own right (e. g. without qt and KDE) but also be used in way to allow people to create applications in qt and kde at the same time. One toolkit to rule them all. And it must be as flexible as possible. In many ways it is kind of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, de-facto really; would be nice to have a way to have something that could target all of the above, but I think the boat has sailed. HTML/CSS/JavaScript kind of won, and perhaps via webassembly we could at the least use something else other than JavaScript.